A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

"Realistic" Dialogue

For
me, one of the hardest things to master has been the art of writing dialogue.
This comes up all the time in discussions of writing. Despite the fact that we
hear and engage in dialogue every day, when it comes to putting it down on
paper, we tend to give up on writing and set to drawing something called a
blank instead.

Readers often complain that dialogue that is
poorly written in a novel sounds unrealistic. That is often the case. Try
reading a bad section of dialogue aloud. If you can even get the inflection
right, it’s not too far gone. Some dialogue is so unnatural that you can’t even
tell what’s supposed to be coming across. Dialogue is a terrible thing to
botch.

So, what makes dialogue sound right? There
isn’t a definite set of dos and don’ts here, a lot of it depends. Check out my
previous post on character voices for further discussion on this. There are a
few things, however that should be avoided in conversational dialogue.

Be careful with sentence-structure
variation. Varying sentence-structure
is a good thing in the narrative text, but how often do you hear somebody start
a sentence with an adjective in conversation? Do people usually say “Happily, I
took the goldfish home,” or “I happily took the goldfish home,?” There are
exceptions, of course. People start sentences more comfortably with the
adjective “finally”. Also double-check when you start a sentence with a
prepositional phrase. You might say “Under my bed, there is an egg-beater” if
you wanted to emphasize the location of the egg-beater. But would you say
“Beside ourselves with excitement, we forgot what we were doing”? Well, you
might, but not every day.

While we’re talking grammar, don’t
worry so much about grammatical correctness in dialogue. Real dialogue
is full of fragments. People leave out words and don’t finish sentences. That’s
a good thing in dialogue, it’s often much more efficient.

At the same time as I’m telling you all this,
let me mention something that you may or may not have ever thought about: Good
dialogue, while natural-sounding, is not actually that realistic. And
readers and critics are just fine with that.

So, what does this mean? Think about it. If
you sit and listen to people having a casual conversation, what do you notice?
Generally, people are very ineloquent and, without context, almost impossible
to understand. On top of unfinished sentences (which are not the same and
fragments), randomly mispronounced, misused, or skipped words, people interrupt
themselves, use sound effects, expressions, gestures, and forget what they were
saying for no reason. There are probably avant-garde authors who write their
dialogue like that, but it might be a pain in the neck to read, and would
probably hinder the flow of the plot, at least in the readers’ minds.

The trick is to sound natural. Dialogue has to be effective above all, not true-to-life.

I’m excited to bring up the subject of
profanity. You know why? Because there’s a lot of discussion among authors
about the use of it, and I tend to disagree. Let me tell you something right
now, You
do not have to use profanity to write good dialogue! There. I said it. I said what commercial
authors are all afraid to say. If you don’t believe in saturating your writing
or even your speech in four-letter words, rock on, tiger. Like I said, just
because that’s how people talk in real life, doesn’t mean you must reproduce it
in your dialogue. If you go out among people who swear in every other sentence,
something should strike you eventually. Profanity is more often than not used
because they couldn’t think of a stronger word. As funny as that
sounds, if you think about it, the way people use profanity today is extremely
empty. The words mean nothing. What
are authors instructed to do with empty words? Don’t do anything with them.

One
word of caution only here: If you don’t use profanity,don’t
use euphemisms in place of it. That is the only time it would be considered awkward dialogue not to swear. If
somebody’s really murderously angry, don’t let them say “darn it.” People will
laugh.

Some authors have argued that not using
profanity will hurt your ability to sell your work. That’s stupid. Can you
imagine getting a rejection slip from a publisher saying “Hated it. There was
no profanity.” That would be their problem, not yours. No one will even care if
there aren’t any four-letter words, and some might not even notice if you heed
the previous paragraph. People who insist upon profanity in literature are
either (1) snobs who think they’re so sophisticated with their overuse of empty
words and phrases, or (2) they have a slight issue with being addicted to
reading dirty words. Either way, it’s not your problem, you don’t need their
money that much anyway, and you can jolly well find another publisher. Their
loss.

So, remember, realistic isn’t actually the
goal. Effectiveness, the ability to relay action and portray character. It’s
not about just sounding like what we hear every day. We all know talk is
boring.